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ExclusiveChinese AI developers may shift to ‘paid weights’ commercial licensing: Goldman Sachs

As use of Chinese artificial intelligence soars, companies will look to boost revenue capture, says bank’s head of Asia internet research

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Vincent ChowPublished: 10:00am, 28 Jul 2026Updated: 10:02am, 28 Jul 2026Chinese artificial intelligence developers could start charging cloud platforms commercial licensing fees to host their open-weight models, according to the head of Asia internet research at Goldman Sachs, as firms look to capture more revenue from their soaring global use.The assessment comes as Chinese AI models – such as Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and Zhipu AI’s GLM-5.2 – have reached performance levels just a fraction behind top US rivals.

However, because Chinese developers typically release their models under open-source terms, foreign platforms and developers can freely download, modify and host the software’s core “weights” – the underlying parameters that encode their intelligence.

Ronald Keung, Hong Kong-based analyst at the US investment bank, said Chinese model builders could generate more revenue by requiring third-party providers to buy commercial licences to serve these models – a process known as inference – on their own infrastructure.

“Domestic growth in adoption is very fast, and we think there’s considerable adoption among small and medium enterprises in the global market, and even larger [companies] are starting to consider using [Chinese models],” Keung said.

An open-source revenue gap

Most Chinese models are currently distributed under permissive software licences, such as the MIT License, which originated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, allowing anyone to use, modify and host the models for free – even for commercial purposes.

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